As I watched bits and pieces of the Conservative Political Action Conference on C-SPAN last week I kept hearing the refrain, ‘we are the party of ideas.’ I shook my head, not because it isn’t true, but because it is true, to a fault. The Right has fallen in love with the efficiency of impersonal contact – where you don’t connect with people on the basis of emotions and sentiment but through the cold, rigid calculus of dynamically-scored policies, slogans and catch-phrases, lobbed from a safe distance.

You know what I mean, the irresistible ideas of ‘free-market capitalism,’ ‘low taxes,’ and ‘less regulation.’ To their credit, the Tea Party has mouthed these phrases with more sincere zeal but generally speaking, if you talk to most folks in the Conservative and Libertarian intellectual movement you’ll get the impression that one day these ‘ideas’ – if repeated often enough - will suddenly grow arms and legs and form an attractive physique and uniformly vote Republican one day. Their case is emboldened by the success of the Heritage Foundation. The title of the book chronicling their history is after all, titled, The Power of Ideas.

While listening to my new favorite ‘political’ talk show on March 10th – The Herd with Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio – Colin Cowherd gave an anecdote that his most talented conservative friends were going into business and finance instead of public service, as opposed to liberals who continue to pursue public service in addition to other fields. While making a brilliant point - that the conservative worldview attracts more scrutiny as a possible explanation - Colin admitted he was at a loss to truly understand why that is.

After spending 16 years in dialogue with Conservatives and Libertarians in Washington D.C.’s Think Tank matrix I can offer Colin an explanation – the Right has gone to the extreme in devaluing and marginalizing those within its movement who understand the power of intellectual charisma and emotional intelligence and who understand there is a wisdom in crowds – popular culture, opinion polls and markets – which transcends political ideology. The Mass is not always a Mob, the Conservative-Libertarian aristocracy has failed to appreciate .

After spending 16 years in dialogue with Conservatives and Libertarians in Washington D.C.’s Think Tank matrix I can offer Colin an explanation – the Right has gone to the extreme in devaluing and marginalizing those within its movement who understand the power of intellectual charisma and emotional intelligence and who understand there is a wisdom in crowds – popular culture, opinion polls and markets – which transcends political ideology. The Mass is not always a Mob, a Conservative-Libertarian aristocracy has failed to appreciate.

That is why I’m telling all of my friends if you want to tap into the political nature of people you’ll have to grow beyond parrot-producing shows on the Left and Right and tune in more to The Herd or another personal favorite of mine, The Hays Advantage With Kathleen Hays and Vonnie Quinn on Bloomberg Radio. You’ll learn more about the electorate and why policies resonate listening to a show based in sports or international financial markets, than one rooted in rabid debate and rigid political ideology.

Force-feeding people ideas has come to matter more than an appreciation of the full range of human nature which finds all of us a bit liberal, part-conservative, some libertarian, a little progressive, with elements of socialism and capitalism to boot.

English: Jack Kemp and Barack Obama at the Public Internet Channel Launch at the National Press Club (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But nothing impressed me more than how Jack felt about people and worked a crowd. He moved gracefully from person to person yet somehow made people feel that he had listened long enough to digest the essence of who they were. If he did not have familiarity with you when he first shook your hand, he seized upon a word, name or phrase to initiate a connection.

Jack had plenty of ideas but because his personality was shaped in another arena, his ideas never overpowered his pleasing personality nor did his attachment to ideas serve as a cover for a lousy personality. When I listen to today’s Conservatives and Libertarians I feel they are so wedded to rigid ideas and espouse them with knee-jerk precision because they just are not comfortable in dealing with the complexity of people. It is far easier to hide behind jargon and tell someone else they are wrong.

In other words, conservatism and even the much more dynamic libertarianism is becoming a hideout for the uncool crowd, even some who use their smarts to bully the supposedly ‘less-informed,' -people who love thinking about life more than they enjoy life itself.

The irony of it all is that as much as these two groups claim Ronald Reagan they hardly resemble him in demeanor. Again, because Ronald Reagan’s intellect was shaped in an arena where tolerance, experimentation, diversity and apolitical attributes were valued – Hollywood - his political persona, like Jack Kemp’s never was idea-first in nature.